Text-Link-Ads New Tips For Beating Google (PageRank Penalty) Asks Bloggers To Sell Their Integrity
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkThursday, November 22, 2007
Text-Link-Ads upped the ante in their fight against Google (in their effort to help people buy page rank) with the following “tips” for bloggers:
- Our advertisers don’t like ad blocks that are titled “Sponsored Links” “Advertisements” “TLA” “Text Link Ads” etc. They prefer no heading but if you do use a heading please consider using an image not text and consider using something like “Recommended Sites”.
- If you are using a “your link here” or “advertise here” “Text Link Ads” or “TLA Links”, link that links back to your listing at Text-Link-Ads.com remove it.
Google was catching on to their scheme and started penalizing sites using TLA most likely by associating paid links with sections starting with “Sponsored Links”, “TLA Links”, “Text Link Ads” etc. or at least that’s what TLA thinks. Google may also be catching text-link-ads own referral scheme as a marker for TLA usage. In any case TLA decided to make it much harder for Google to catch TLA advertisers by asking them to remove headers from their link sections and / or replace them with “Recommended sites”.
Previously they used to display TLA publishers with links on their web sites. They will now provide the publisher url only after purchasing, an obvious ploy to prevent search engines from finding the names of TLA sites. However any intern can still find the TLA sites by browsing through the search results. He may need to use the credit card to purchas and then cancel immediately afterwards.
It isn’t rocket science. Want to know the names of 7 random TLA publishers? Here it goes:
The Real Estate Journal, Career Opportunities - The Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal, CJB.NET, XOOPS, OverCampus, Cafelog, Mantis etc.
Text-Link-Ads is asking bloggers to compromise their integrity. TLA ads are definitely not recommended sites by any long shot of imagination. They are sponsored sites, plain and simple.
One of my friend decided to bail out after this email from TLA. He will no longer use text-link-ads on his site, a decision I had taken several months ago. I wonder how many bloggers will similarly bail out and how many will compromise their integrity and stay on.
BTW: TLA doesn’t provide any way to cancel their account. What I did was take out all TLA code from my sites and stopped using it.
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October 24, 2009: 5:15 am
I use TLA on few of my sites. Yes, you are right, there is no any delete site button:) I worte to support i removed code from one of my stes and they simply deleted my site from their database. |
 john |
April 8, 2009: 4:00 am
balls with the google, they don’t want other advertising company to come up, they just want to rule |
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March 7, 2009: 10:15 pm
I was looking for any tips about TLA and I found yours. I guess I’ll think twice before putting sponsored ads on my blog, thanks for sharing |
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November 2, 2008: 3:10 pm
No matter what somebody will do to avoid the google penaly, google will always find a way to penalise all these sites. Sooner or later. |
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June 1, 2008: 1:47 pm
[...] policy changes. The first was down-right unethical, and the second was down-right confusing. Angsuman discussed these policy changes a few days ago, but now that I’m free of their grasp, I think it’s time to share my [...] |
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December 12, 2007: 9:13 am
You can cancel - just call the publisher support line and tell them to cancel it. They did it for a friend of mine. |
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December 6, 2007: 3:56 pm
I just got into a bit of a tiff with TLA myself about this… I would prefer not to have to resort to TLA and would like more obvious forms of sponsorship, but I make very clear through my use of these google-identifiable disclaimers just what is going on. |
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November 27, 2007: 10:05 am
Nice info. Thanx for sharing and giving the good tips. I just started my blog, and planning to put Google ads when I have more visitor. Perhaps you could give me a support. Thanx a bunch |
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November 26, 2007: 11:37 pm
After not receiving a response for about a week (see first comment), I decided to re-send my request and got a reply in only 40 minutes (go figure). Unfortunately, since closing your account now constitutes a “breach of contract”, I will not be compensated for the past month of ad display. You dodged the bullet on that one, Angsuman! |
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November 25, 2007: 10:14 am
Angusman, thanks for the couple of posts about TLA. I had just been looking at them as a way to boost the PR of my blog. However, I do not want to venture into anything remotely grey or black, in terms of gaining traffic and an audience. It is sad that advertisers expect bloggers to sell out, just like any other company. But that is ignoring the basis of blogging: honesty from your fellow person. Thanks again! |
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November 22, 2007: 5:12 pm
I recently received one of those “published updates” from TLA and have contacted their support department to close my TLA account because of it. Unfortunately, no one has responded for three days now. The first point simply shows the typical business sense of any advertiser. It basically says, “We don’t care about your site. We just want people to click on our ads.” While I normally wouldn’t be bothered by this, TLA was founded on the principle that advertisements should be unobtrusive, but this recommendation seems to go against that principle. Scott Yang recently received a request to “change the ‘Sponsored Links’ text to something like ‘Friends’ or something along those lines,” which further betrays their company’s original ideals and crosses a line by requesting that the publisher intentionally deceive his audience. These links don’t represent friends, they represent sponsors. The last point is very puzzling. TLA’s referral system allows you to create “Advertise Here” (and similar) links which link back to your listing at TLA, and even though this option still exists, they are very to-the-point about removing such links. Furthermore, these links help to direct interested parties towards TLA and eventually result in more revenue for both the publisher and TLA. This request does not seem practical, unless they are planning to close TLA, or are desperate to decrease ad sales. The online advertising industry is slowly becoming confusing and obtrusive again. In the long-run, my blog doesn’t need commercial sponsors to stay alive. I left AdSense two months ago, and now it’s time to leave TLA before things get any worse. |
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